In an Enhanced Packet System (EPS), a registration area is referred to as a Tracking Area List (TA List) and includes one or more basic registration areas (that is, tracking areas). The tracking area may be considered to be similar to a routing area in a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) packet domain. A Mobility Management Entity (MME) allocates a registration area to user equipment. When there is no signaling connection between the user equipment and a network, that is, the user equipment is in an idle state, the mobility management entity may send paging signaling to the user equipment in the registration area, to enable the user equipment to establish a signaling connection to the network, that is, to enable the user equipment to switch to a connected state. However, when the user equipment moves outside the registration area, because the mobility management entity cannot page the user equipment in the original registration area, a signaling connection between the user equipment and the network cannot be established.
In the prior art, the foregoing problem is resolved by reallocating a registration area. Specifically, when user equipment moves outside a registration area, the user equipment sends a tracking area update request message to a mobility management entity, and sends, to the mobility management entity, a tracking area currently accessed by the user equipment and a tracking area accessed by the user equipment in the last time. The mobility management entity reallocates a registration area to the user equipment, and the registration area includes at least the tracking area in which the user equipment is currently located.
However, in the registration area reallocated by the mobility management entity to the user equipment, some tracking areas are not accessed by the user equipment in a particular time. For some user terminals that are busy with services and are paged for many times, each time the mobility management entity sends, in the tracking areas that are not accessed, a paging signaling message to user equipment, a network paging signaling message is wasted.